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Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions
So 25+ years ago, Nintendo wanted to mix things up a bit with Mario and decided they wanted to make an RPG. Since they had no background in RPGs, they teamed with Square (the Final Fantasy people) to do it. The result was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, which ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPS. I played it a little bit as a kid because my brother rented it, but I didn't get very far because I never got very far in video games in the 90s. Then in college I discovered the wide and wonderful world of video game piracy, said "hey, I remember that one" while downloading a truly unhinged number of SNES games, and played the whole thing on an emulator.
Super Mario RPG is a beloved classic, but even though the Square partnership is the reason it's so fucking good, it was also a one-off. Which means this game essentially has divorced parents, because Square and Nintendo are both huge companies now and huge companies only give a shit about What's Theirs and not about what would be nice for the legacy of a game that's no longer making any money. So Super Mario RPG, DESPITE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPPING, never got a sequel and the characters it introduced have mostly fallen by the wayside.
Instead, it has SPIRITUAL SEQUELS, aka Nintendo was like "that worked, but hammering out an ongoing shared custody agreement with Square would be a hassle, so let's just do more unrelated Mario RPGs." The Paper Mario series is the most well known, but apparently there was also a handheld series: the Mario & Luigi games. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was the first in 2003, and they did a 3DS remake in 2017 that I asked for for Christmas in 2018 for reasons I no longer specifically remember but I'm sure involved me googling "best nintendo DS games" and finding something that said this one was similar to Super Mario RPG (which, again, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPS). Then I tried it for like an hour and forgot about it until now.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga doesn't absolutely fucking whip, but it was a good time! It absolutely had Super Mario RPG vibes and while it made me miss SMRPG more than it scratched the itch, it was at least in a nice way and not in a "why am I playing this when I could just be playing the game I actually want to be playing" kind of way.
The premise here is that some evil witch shows up and steals Peach's voice, leaving her unable to speak in anything but "explosive" language, which is supposed to be literal (her speech bubbles have bomb emojis and she is absolutely wrecking the place every time she opens her mouth) but is much funnier if you assume it's figurative and she's just cussing up a storm. You chase the thief from the Mushroom Kingdom to the neighboring Beanbean Kingdom, which is where the game takes place. The focus of the quest pretty quickly shifts away from Peach's voice but I'm not getting into the plot bc this is a Mario game and the story is meaningless.
THINGS:
1. It's very funny to me how I'm like "bean people, things of that nature...that's preposterous" and genuinely thought it was an overly twee setting for the game before I realized that it is EXACTLY as weird as every other Mario game being set in the Mushroom Kingdom and full of talking toadstools. Some real Body Ritual Among The Nacirema shit. THE THINGS WE THINK ARE NORMAL BECAUSE WE ARE USED TO THEM!
2. The people who wrote this game probably didn't do it with the conscious thought "Yoshi is experiencing microagressions" but that is what happens and it is HILARIOUS. There aren't many Yoshis in the Beanbean Kingdom but a rich man there is obsessed with them and is like "I know what I'll do...I'll build a movie theater JUST FOR YOSHIS" and then when you talk to one of the Yoshis inside he's like "yeah these seats look comfortable but I can't sit in them because my tail gets in the way," which is a clear sign that nobody who had a hand in designing this theater for Yoshis knows a single Yoshi. Another Yoshi is suffering through a conversation with a Yoshi-obsessed bean person who is very excited to come to this space for Yoshis and gawk at them. IDK IT WAS VERY FUNNY I LOVED IT.
3. So all the combat in this game involves hitting a button at a precise moment and uhhhhhhhh I fucking hate it. It's not a knock on the game because it's not an issue of execution or anything, it's just something I am personally fucking terrible at. Super Mario RPG did this to an extent but it was like "when you attack an enemy, if you hit a button at the right time, you will do bonus damage" aka I would do the base damage no matter what! I could be rewarded for nailing the timing but I could not be punished for botching it! IDEAL FOR ME, THE PERSON WITH NO SENSE FOR TIMING OR RHYTHM! Superstar Saga basically told me to fuck myself right out the gate. You can fuck up the timing on your attacks badly enough that you basically whiff the hit. You also have to PRECISELY DODGE every attack that comes your way? And every enemy has MULTIPLE DIFFERENT ATTACKS, EACH OF WHICH ARE UNIQUE TO THEM? Like it's one thing when someone shoots a projectile at me and I just need to jump over it but it's all this "when the monster wiggles towards you, hit A as they lean back during the third wiggle" I CANNOT! I AM NOT CUT OUT FOR IT! Similarly I was mostly able to master timing on basic attacks (when you jump on someone, hit A at the moment the jump connects, etc) but there are COMBO ATTACKS that all have MULTIPLE PRECISION BUTTON PRESSES and you will WHIFF IT IF YOU MISS ANY OF THEM? I tried. I really tried. The game has a mode that lets you practice these and I would do them over and over until I felt like I had the timing and then I would try them in battle and botch it completely. I gave up on them completely like six hours in, which, it's deranged to try to get through an RPG without using any special attacks, but I MADE IT WORK, MOSTLY.
My strategy was to just maximize my attack stat and use an item called the Great Force (a cute little reference to Zelda's Triforce, it looks exactly like it and the Zelda item music plays when you receive it), which doubles any damage you do to enemies, but at the cost of also doubling any damage you receive. So at that point I also had to max my defense stat, because as mentioned above I WAS VERY BAD AT NOT GETTING HIT. And it was mostly fine! Some of the harder battles I would die and restart a couple of times while I got the hang of some of the timing, or while I simply waited for the RNG to be kind enough to lean more on the attacks that were easier for me to avoid, but it was very manageable! And then I got to the final boss, the one enemy in the game that gets to hit you with SEVERAL different attacks in sequence before it's your turn to do anything, and they all did SO MUCH DAMAGE and were SO HARD TO DODGE, and I was doing relatively little damage even moreso than usual because my go-tos weren't particularly effective and I had to spend half my turns healing myself instead of attacking, and still! I was making progress! I was getting better! I was reliably reaching the part of the battle that Actually Mattered, but then I was like "I should look up the HP on this thing because if it's much higher than like 500 I don't know that I can ever get to a point where I can do this" AND IT WAS 1200???????????? FUCK THAT. I WOULD HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THAT BITCH ALL NIGHT AND I NEVER WOULD HAVE GOTTEN ANYWHERE. I TURNED ON EASY MODE AND I DID IT IN ONE TRY. CREDITS. BOOM.
4. You fight Bowser a couple of times in this game but he's not the main antagonist or even truly an antagonist at all? He comes with you at the beginning because he's like "how am I ever going to kidnap Princess Peach again if her voice would do structural damage to my castle, I'll help fix this" and then he's brainwashed or something and then he's possessed but the Active Villain is always clearly Cackletta. So it's fucking wild when, freshly un-possessed Bowser is unconscious at the end of the game and this little bean prince is like "I've rigged his entire castle to explode :D" and Mario and Luigi are just like COOL WE'RE GETTING OUT OF HERE and leave Bowser to die???? HE WAKES UP AND GETS OUT IN TIME BUT MARIO DID NOT ASSIST WITH THAT AT ALL.
5. "A ship of pirates that was lost so long ago that now they're a bunch of skeleton pirates and the ship is in the desert but later it gets brought out to sea" is probably TOO specific for me to feel like it's just a crazy coincidence and this game didn't fully rip off Oracle of Seasons with that one.
6. All the special moves for navigating the overworld were cool - special jumps and hammer techniques and magic abilities that impacted how you interacted with the world and how you moved around. It's a fun quirk of Mario RPGs when they include platforming elements like that. I will say that combined with the combat encounters, this could make backtracking really tedious - it's one thing when I need to execute a few specific moves to be able to access a new area, it's another when it's my fifth time going back and forth between Area A and Area B and I keep having to switch between special moves while at the same time trying to avoid making contact with any little spiny guys because every time I do that's thirty seconds lost to a bullshit fight with enemies that are 30 levels below me. ANYWAY HAMMERING LUIGI INTO A SLOT IN THE GROUND SO THAT HE POPS OUT AS A SURFBOARD YOU CAN SAIL THE OCEAN ON....IT'S GOOD.
7. There was just SUCH a Super Mario RPG vibe off this thing which is a very high compliment. It doesn't really get there (the gameplay is not on the same level and a two-character RPG is going to be inherently less engaging to me than one with a full party) but it really does feel similar. The energy is there! The Beanbean Kingdom feels like it exists in the same world as wherever the fuck Super Mario RPG takes place!
8. There's a really weird line where the characters are talking about going into Bowser's castle to defeat Cackletta and Mario has this weird line* about how he knows the way from Bowser's room to the bathroom? Like very specifically that is what he knows about Bowser's castle: how to get from Bowser's room to the bathroom. MARIO AND BOWSER ARE FUCKING?
9. *Technically Mario doesn't really have "lines" because what happens when he talks is a voice actor speaks gibberish with a strong Italian accent. Same goes for Luigi. Incredible stuff.
10. UMMMMM I DON'T KNOW. I GAVE THIS GAME 4 STARS ON BACKLOGGD BUT I FEEL LIKE THIS IS MOSTLY NEGATIVE? 4/5 stars is 80, it's a low B. It was a good time and I doubt I'll ever feel the need to revisit it. I don't have any real criticism but it didn't particularly hit. A SOLID B!
Super Mario RPG is a beloved classic, but even though the Square partnership is the reason it's so fucking good, it was also a one-off. Which means this game essentially has divorced parents, because Square and Nintendo are both huge companies now and huge companies only give a shit about What's Theirs and not about what would be nice for the legacy of a game that's no longer making any money. So Super Mario RPG, DESPITE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPPING, never got a sequel and the characters it introduced have mostly fallen by the wayside.
Instead, it has SPIRITUAL SEQUELS, aka Nintendo was like "that worked, but hammering out an ongoing shared custody agreement with Square would be a hassle, so let's just do more unrelated Mario RPGs." The Paper Mario series is the most well known, but apparently there was also a handheld series: the Mario & Luigi games. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was the first in 2003, and they did a 3DS remake in 2017 that I asked for for Christmas in 2018 for reasons I no longer specifically remember but I'm sure involved me googling "best nintendo DS games" and finding something that said this one was similar to Super Mario RPG (which, again, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPS). Then I tried it for like an hour and forgot about it until now.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga doesn't absolutely fucking whip, but it was a good time! It absolutely had Super Mario RPG vibes and while it made me miss SMRPG more than it scratched the itch, it was at least in a nice way and not in a "why am I playing this when I could just be playing the game I actually want to be playing" kind of way.
The premise here is that some evil witch shows up and steals Peach's voice, leaving her unable to speak in anything but "explosive" language, which is supposed to be literal (her speech bubbles have bomb emojis and she is absolutely wrecking the place every time she opens her mouth) but is much funnier if you assume it's figurative and she's just cussing up a storm. You chase the thief from the Mushroom Kingdom to the neighboring Beanbean Kingdom, which is where the game takes place. The focus of the quest pretty quickly shifts away from Peach's voice but I'm not getting into the plot bc this is a Mario game and the story is meaningless.
THINGS:
1. It's very funny to me how I'm like "bean people, things of that nature...that's preposterous" and genuinely thought it was an overly twee setting for the game before I realized that it is EXACTLY as weird as every other Mario game being set in the Mushroom Kingdom and full of talking toadstools. Some real Body Ritual Among The Nacirema shit. THE THINGS WE THINK ARE NORMAL BECAUSE WE ARE USED TO THEM!
2. The people who wrote this game probably didn't do it with the conscious thought "Yoshi is experiencing microagressions" but that is what happens and it is HILARIOUS. There aren't many Yoshis in the Beanbean Kingdom but a rich man there is obsessed with them and is like "I know what I'll do...I'll build a movie theater JUST FOR YOSHIS" and then when you talk to one of the Yoshis inside he's like "yeah these seats look comfortable but I can't sit in them because my tail gets in the way," which is a clear sign that nobody who had a hand in designing this theater for Yoshis knows a single Yoshi. Another Yoshi is suffering through a conversation with a Yoshi-obsessed bean person who is very excited to come to this space for Yoshis and gawk at them. IDK IT WAS VERY FUNNY I LOVED IT.
3. So all the combat in this game involves hitting a button at a precise moment and uhhhhhhhh I fucking hate it. It's not a knock on the game because it's not an issue of execution or anything, it's just something I am personally fucking terrible at. Super Mario RPG did this to an extent but it was like "when you attack an enemy, if you hit a button at the right time, you will do bonus damage" aka I would do the base damage no matter what! I could be rewarded for nailing the timing but I could not be punished for botching it! IDEAL FOR ME, THE PERSON WITH NO SENSE FOR TIMING OR RHYTHM! Superstar Saga basically told me to fuck myself right out the gate. You can fuck up the timing on your attacks badly enough that you basically whiff the hit. You also have to PRECISELY DODGE every attack that comes your way? And every enemy has MULTIPLE DIFFERENT ATTACKS, EACH OF WHICH ARE UNIQUE TO THEM? Like it's one thing when someone shoots a projectile at me and I just need to jump over it but it's all this "when the monster wiggles towards you, hit A as they lean back during the third wiggle" I CANNOT! I AM NOT CUT OUT FOR IT! Similarly I was mostly able to master timing on basic attacks (when you jump on someone, hit A at the moment the jump connects, etc) but there are COMBO ATTACKS that all have MULTIPLE PRECISION BUTTON PRESSES and you will WHIFF IT IF YOU MISS ANY OF THEM? I tried. I really tried. The game has a mode that lets you practice these and I would do them over and over until I felt like I had the timing and then I would try them in battle and botch it completely. I gave up on them completely like six hours in, which, it's deranged to try to get through an RPG without using any special attacks, but I MADE IT WORK, MOSTLY.
My strategy was to just maximize my attack stat and use an item called the Great Force (a cute little reference to Zelda's Triforce, it looks exactly like it and the Zelda item music plays when you receive it), which doubles any damage you do to enemies, but at the cost of also doubling any damage you receive. So at that point I also had to max my defense stat, because as mentioned above I WAS VERY BAD AT NOT GETTING HIT. And it was mostly fine! Some of the harder battles I would die and restart a couple of times while I got the hang of some of the timing, or while I simply waited for the RNG to be kind enough to lean more on the attacks that were easier for me to avoid, but it was very manageable! And then I got to the final boss, the one enemy in the game that gets to hit you with SEVERAL different attacks in sequence before it's your turn to do anything, and they all did SO MUCH DAMAGE and were SO HARD TO DODGE, and I was doing relatively little damage even moreso than usual because my go-tos weren't particularly effective and I had to spend half my turns healing myself instead of attacking, and still! I was making progress! I was getting better! I was reliably reaching the part of the battle that Actually Mattered, but then I was like "I should look up the HP on this thing because if it's much higher than like 500 I don't know that I can ever get to a point where I can do this" AND IT WAS 1200???????????? FUCK THAT. I WOULD HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THAT BITCH ALL NIGHT AND I NEVER WOULD HAVE GOTTEN ANYWHERE. I TURNED ON EASY MODE AND I DID IT IN ONE TRY. CREDITS. BOOM.
4. You fight Bowser a couple of times in this game but he's not the main antagonist or even truly an antagonist at all? He comes with you at the beginning because he's like "how am I ever going to kidnap Princess Peach again if her voice would do structural damage to my castle, I'll help fix this" and then he's brainwashed or something and then he's possessed but the Active Villain is always clearly Cackletta. So it's fucking wild when, freshly un-possessed Bowser is unconscious at the end of the game and this little bean prince is like "I've rigged his entire castle to explode :D" and Mario and Luigi are just like COOL WE'RE GETTING OUT OF HERE and leave Bowser to die???? HE WAKES UP AND GETS OUT IN TIME BUT MARIO DID NOT ASSIST WITH THAT AT ALL.
5. "A ship of pirates that was lost so long ago that now they're a bunch of skeleton pirates and the ship is in the desert but later it gets brought out to sea" is probably TOO specific for me to feel like it's just a crazy coincidence and this game didn't fully rip off Oracle of Seasons with that one.
6. All the special moves for navigating the overworld were cool - special jumps and hammer techniques and magic abilities that impacted how you interacted with the world and how you moved around. It's a fun quirk of Mario RPGs when they include platforming elements like that. I will say that combined with the combat encounters, this could make backtracking really tedious - it's one thing when I need to execute a few specific moves to be able to access a new area, it's another when it's my fifth time going back and forth between Area A and Area B and I keep having to switch between special moves while at the same time trying to avoid making contact with any little spiny guys because every time I do that's thirty seconds lost to a bullshit fight with enemies that are 30 levels below me. ANYWAY HAMMERING LUIGI INTO A SLOT IN THE GROUND SO THAT HE POPS OUT AS A SURFBOARD YOU CAN SAIL THE OCEAN ON....IT'S GOOD.
7. There was just SUCH a Super Mario RPG vibe off this thing which is a very high compliment. It doesn't really get there (the gameplay is not on the same level and a two-character RPG is going to be inherently less engaging to me than one with a full party) but it really does feel similar. The energy is there! The Beanbean Kingdom feels like it exists in the same world as wherever the fuck Super Mario RPG takes place!
8. There's a really weird line where the characters are talking about going into Bowser's castle to defeat Cackletta and Mario has this weird line* about how he knows the way from Bowser's room to the bathroom? Like very specifically that is what he knows about Bowser's castle: how to get from Bowser's room to the bathroom. MARIO AND BOWSER ARE FUCKING?
9. *Technically Mario doesn't really have "lines" because what happens when he talks is a voice actor speaks gibberish with a strong Italian accent. Same goes for Luigi. Incredible stuff.
10. UMMMMM I DON'T KNOW. I GAVE THIS GAME 4 STARS ON BACKLOGGD BUT I FEEL LIKE THIS IS MOSTLY NEGATIVE? 4/5 stars is 80, it's a low B. It was a good time and I doubt I'll ever feel the need to revisit it. I don't have any real criticism but it didn't particularly hit. A SOLID B!